british empire | Pandaemonium

REWRITING COLONIALISM

February 26, 2023 by Kenan Malik

This review of Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was published in the Observer, 19 February 2023. In 1857, in the wake of the “Indian Mutiny”, a British officer, Lt George Cracklow, described in a letter home what happened to captured rebels. “The prisoners were marched up to the guns… and lashed to the muzzles,” he wrote. “The guns exploded… I could hardly see for the smoke for about 2 seconds when down came something with a thud about 5 yards […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: british empire, colonialism, indian mutiny, john stuart mill, nigel biggar, racism, slavery

SOVEREIGNTY NOT JUST WHEN IT IS POLITICALLY CONVENIENT

March 30, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the British denial of sovereignty , was my Observer column this week. It was published on 27 March 2022, under the headline “As the imperial ties are being cast aside, a royal tour was always going to be a farce”. Sovereignty, we are told, matters. It matters in Ukraine. It matters in Brexit. And, for some, the freedom afforded by sovereignty in the one instance is analogous to that afforded in the other. Many of those who celebrate sovereignty against […]

Categories: Britain, International • Tags: british commonwealth, british empire, caribbean, caroline elkins, chagos islands, john stuart mill, kemi badenoch, nigel biggar, royal family, sovereignty, windrush scandal

THE ANGLOSPHERE AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

September 28, 2021 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the myths of the “Anglosphere”, was my Observer column this week. It was published in the Observer, 26 September 2021, under the headline “We should not allow the Anglosphere to distort the history of liberty“. “A people that idly sips its cognac on the boulevards as it lightly takes a trifling part in the comedie humaine,” Franklin Giddings, professor of sociology at Columbia University, taunted contemptuously in 1900, “can only go down in the struggle for existence with men who have […]

Categories: Britain, History, International • Tags: anglo-saxon, anglosphere, aukus, british empire, britishness, daniel hannan, englishness, freedom struggles, haitian revolution, john locke, liberties, linda colley, nigel farage, radical enlightenment, slavery, spinoza

THE WOKE AND THE UNWOKE

February 16, 2021 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the polarisation between “woke” and “anti-woke” arguments, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 February 2021, under the headline “Woke warriors on the march? Don’t forget the bigotry of the ‘unwoke’”. Want to rid an Oxford college of a statue of an imperialist? That’s “wokery”. Too many immigrants? Blame the woke. Insufficiently appreciative of the British empire? You’re in the “Woke Orthodoxy”. Want to strangle Andrew Neil’s new radio station even before it airs? That’s the “woke warriors”. Joe […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: anti-semitism, anti-woke, anti-zionism, brian eno, british empire, cecil rhodes, cynical theories, david baddiel, frankfurt school, free speech, james lindsay, ken loach, nigel biggar, racism, unwoke, white privilege, whiteness, winston churchill, woke, wokeness

MAKING EMPIRE ETHICAL

October 31, 2020 by Kenan Malik

. This is a review of Priya Satia’s Time’s Monster, published in the Observer, 25 October 2020. In his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, written in 1963 while in prison for having taken part in a banned march against segregation, Martin Luther King Jr describes receiving a letter from a “white brother in Texas” who had told him that “all Christians know that the coloured people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History • Tags: anti-colonialism, british empire, colonialism, enlightenment, ethics, imperialism, james mill, john stuart mill, priya satia, thomas macaulay, time's monster

THE GREAT BRITISH EMPIRE DEBATE

January 26, 2018 by Kenan Malik

This essay on the debate about the merits of colonialism, and of the British Empire in particular, was published 26 January in the New York Review Daily. The sun may have long ago set on the British Empire (or on all but a few tattered shreds of it), but it never seems to set on the debate about the merits of empire. The latest controversy began when the Third World Quarterly, an academic journal known for its radical stance, published […]

Categories: Britain, International, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: adam horschild, belgian congo, bengal famine, british empire, british politics, bruce gilley, colonialism, david olusoga, enlightenment, india, ireland, mordant bay rebellion, nigel biggar, shashi tharoor, slave trade, slavery

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ORNAMENTALISM

August 15, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I am away for a couple of weeks, so the next few posts will be from the archives – old material that I have not previously published on Pandaemonium. All will, in fact, be book reviews that explore themes of race, difference and identity. This first is a review of David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism, first published in the New Statesman, 7 May 2001. . Review of David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Allen Lane, 2001) In October 1865, […]

Categories: Britain, Culture & Books, History • Tags: british empire, david cannadine, edward said, equality, imperialism, orientalism, racism, universalism